The List of Audiobooks (most via Audible) in my library (and I have listened to) (when I find the time, I’ll update this list).

Background: I’ve discovered I enjoy much more listening to audiobooks, instead of reading (not that I enjoy reading, but with a family of 3 kids I cannot free up sufficient time for reading). Listening to spoken text works for me very well, I can digest the content and re-listen to parts of books as I like. Audible offers different subscription rates.

Why Modern Agile?

Over the past decade, innovative companies, software industry thought leaders and lean/agile pioneers have discovered simpler, sturdier, more streamlined ways to be agile. These modern approaches share a focus on producing exceptional outcomes and growing an outstanding culture. Today, it makes far more sense to bypass antiquated agility in favor of modern approaches.

World famous organizations like Google, Amazon, AirBnB, Etsy and others are living proof of the power of these four principles. However, you don’t need to be a name brand company to leverage modern agile wisdom.

What is Modern Agile?

“Modern Agile is a community for people interested in uncovering better ways of getting awesome results. It leverages wisdom from many industries, is principle driven and framework free.”

— Joshua Kerievsky, CEO, Industrial Logic.

Modern agile is the result of courage, feedback, simplicity, communication, and respect for people.

4 guiding principles

Modern Agile has 4 guiding principles:

Make Users Awesome

Make Safety a Prerequisite

Experiment & Learn Rapidly

Deliver Value Continuously

These principles unfold (expand) in many practices! These are not only applicable to software development.

Who is Joshua Kerievsky?

Joshua is the founder and CEO of Industrial Logic, a pioneering Extreme Programming/Lean consultancy that radically improves the software development capabilities of organizations around the globe.

In the mid-1990s, Joshua was among a small community of “lightweight methods” practitioners experimenting with better ways of developing software. Since then, he’s helped thousands of people across hundreds of organizations learn better ways of making software, carefully reviewing and revising methods with the greatest impact and return on investment. Today, he leads an effort to modernize Agile by removing outdated practices and leveraging the best of what the software community and other industries have learned about achieving awesome results. Modern agile practitioners work to Make People Awesome, Make Safety A Prerequisite, Experiment & Learn Rapidly and Deliver Value Continuously.

Sociocratic decisions are made with consent. Consent means there is no reason not to object. In other words, there are no compelling reasons not to agree to proceed and to try out whatever is being proposed. Any concerns raised can be taken into account. Objections must be taken into account and are to be resolved.

Prerequisites for consent decision making

participants involved are consciously thinking about moving forward with a proposal for next best action (“it’s good enough for now, and safe enough to try”),

all participants consider each other equivalent.

Pattern for sociocratic decision making

Introduce the matter to decide upon (in sociocracy 3.0 this called a “driver”: what’s happening right now that motivates us to present this matter?)

Round of consent agreeing to the matter

Present the proposal for next best action

Round of clarifying questions

Round of brief response – in order to get a first short indication of level of agreement

Indicate consent (agree with consent, object, agree with concerns)

Resolve objections (one by one) by improving the proposal (on the spot, or prepare for next meeting)

I’ve stumble upon this list, and I like it – as it clarifies again a bit the role of the Scrum Master.

Source: https://age-of-product.com/70-scrum-master-theses/

Scrum is not a methodology, but a framework. There are no rules that apply to each and every scenario — just practices that have worked before in other organizations.

Successful practices of other organizations cannot simply be copied to your own. Every practice requires a particular context to work.

You need to determine for yourself what works for your organization — which is a process, not a destination.

The role of a scrum master is primarily one of leadership and coaching. It is not a management role.

A scrum master should recognize that different stages of a scrum team’s development require different approaches: some, teaching; some, coaching; and some, mentoring.

A scrum master should be familiar with the Shu-Ha-Ri concept of learning new techniques.

A scrum master’s principal objective should be to remove themselves from daily operations by enabling the scrum team to be self-organizing and self-managing.

Being a scrum master does not entail, and should never entail, enforcing processes.

Scrum is not designed for bean counters, although some metrics are helpful in understanding the health of a scrum team. Generally, insisting that the team achieve specific KPI (for example, commitments vs. velocity) does not help.

Scrum doesn’t elaborate on the process that enables a product owner to add valuable, usable, and feasible user stories to the product backlog. Product discovery using the Design Thinking, Lean Startup, or Lean UX methodologies may help, but in any case, a good scrum master will want the scrum team to be a part of this process (whether participating in user interviews or running experiments).

A scrum team’s communication with stakeholders should not be run through a gatekeeper (e.g., solely through the product owner) because this hurts transparency and negatively affects the team’s performance. Sprint reviews, conversely, are a good way to stay in close contact with stakeholders and to present the value delivered by the team during each previous sprint.

The most important objective of a sprint in Scrum is to deliver a DONE product increment – a piece of working software delivering value for the end-user. That is the goal today, and always has been the goal.

In a context, in which multiple Scrum teams work on the same product, it’s the goal – and only goal – to deliver each (and every) sprint an integrated product increment – so no UNDONE work left at the end of the sprint.

How do you define DONE?

Scrum does not define what “done” means for a product – that’s to be defined by the development team.

Yet the goal is to get better and raise the bar, in order to be able to deliver a piece of valuable working software at the end of each sprint.

With support of the Scrum Master, the development team improves their practices at a steady pace to be able to reach that goal.

“As Scrum Teams mature, it is expected that their definitions of “Done” will expand to include more stringent criteria for higher quality. Any one product or system should have a definition of “Done” that is a standard for any work done on it.”

Unfortunately, we observe that many Scrum teams (or teams saying to practice Scrum) are not able to deliver a done product increment at the end of each sprint. In the world of software development, this means a piece of working software (end to end) ready to be used by a customer (end-user). Some teams simply do not care and finish the work till done at a next sprint.

The output at the of the sprint has been called a potentially shippable product increment. Some teams interpreted this as “the product increment is ready to be shipped, but actually there’s still some work to do to actually release it to the customer“. That’s obviously not the point.

That’s why the Scrum Guide says:

“The Development Team consists of professionals who do the work of delivering a potentially releasable Increment of “Done” product at the end of each Sprint.”

A lesson from Scrum history

Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber, – the creators of Scrum have been updated the Scrum guide over time. It’s interesting to read how in previous versions of the Scrum guide there was more detail about what done actually means, and what to do with “undone” work. The reason in general that some artefact and details have been left out, is to make the description of Scrum as a framework more simple, clear to understand and lightweight.

A completely “done” increment includes all of the analysis, design, refactoring, programming, documentation and testing for the increment and all Product Backlog items in the increment. Testing includes unit, system, user, and regression testing, as well as non-functional tests such as performance, stability, security, and integration. Done includes any internationalization.

You clearly get the picture, that “done” includes all the work necessary to be able to have a piece of releasable, valuable software at the end of the sprint.

It continues:

“Undone” work is often accumulated in a Product Backlog item called “Undone Work” or “Implementation Work.”

Sprint by Sprint, the “undone” work of each increment is accumulated and must be addressed prior to releasing the product. This work is accumulated linearly although it actually has some sort of exponential accumulation that is dependent on each organization’s characteristics. Release Sprints are added to the end of any release to complete this “undone” work. The number of Sprints is unpredictable to the degree that the accumulation of “undone” work is not linear.

Take care, the current Scrum Guide does not specify a “release sprint” as a practice. This is similar to the “hardening” sprint defined in – for example – the Scaled Agile Framework. In Scrum, this is considered a bad practice. As stated the goal – and only goal is to create a done product increment at the end of each sprint. “Undone” work piles up and increases risks and delays.

The word “undone” is not mentioned anymore in the current version of the Scrum Guide.

A perfect definition of done

Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) (by Craig Larman and Bas Vodde) do explicitly mention “undone” work – in larger organisations there are often whole teams (e.g. an “operations” team, a “services” team) or whole departments (“operations” departement) or people (“release manager”) existing which are to be considered part of “undone” work if this cannot be done as part of the sprint (and it often cannot be done within a sprint).

A perfect definition of “done” implies that each product increment is

valuable

immediately releasable to the end-user

And that should be the goal of perfection.

To be able to achieve this as a team, effort is necessary to invest in:

software craftsmanship

automated testing

continuous integration

deployment automation

without sound technical practices it’s fairly impossible to achieve this on any scale (small or large).

Do not make a mistake, this is quite a challenge for many teams who (try to) practice Scrum.

All variants on Scrum who do not achieve the actual state of “done” product increments, according to the rules stipulated in the Scrum guide, are not to be considered Scrum teams.

What does done means in software development?

I quote this from – Ken Schwaber – and any software development team should adhere to these (working in Scrum or not)

The end result should include software that has:

Presence of valuable functionality for customers to use;

Absence of low value functionality that must be maintained and sustained regardless;

Quality code base to predictably maintain and sustain;

Quality code base to enhance without undue effort or risk;

Ability to catch defects early and no later than at release;

Predictability of schedules; and,

A Lack of surprises.

Which raises the question, what is quality software?

It has these characteristics:

I can readily understand the software and where & how things happen;

When I change or add to part of the software, there are no unintended or poorly designed dependencies;

I can read the code without looking for tricks or poorly defined and labeled variables or data;

I don’t need the person(s) that wrote the code to explain it to me;

There are a full set of (automated) tests to check that the function works as expected;

When I change something and add to the tests, I can check that the entire change and product continues to work;

Quite often people wonder why Scrum – a framework for complex product development – has the rules as described in the Scrum Guide. The authors of Scrum (Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland) say that the framework contains the roles, events, artifacts, and the rules that bind them together necessary to operate. Adding, changing or removing something will not make it Scrum anymore and a Scrum team will not work optimally.

Quote by Ken Schwaber:

“Scrum is a general-purpose framework applicable in complex situations, where more is unknown about the parameters than is known. The rules of empiricism and self-organizing make it work within short iterations that control the risk and increase chances of finding answers and creating value. The few roles, artifacts and events are fixed so the Scrum team can focus on unraveling complexity.”

I came across an interesting article on InfoQ, it’s titled “Transforming from Projects to Products“. If you want deeper understanding on topics, InfoQ offers descent and great articles. So I’d like you (someone in any position who plans or is part of an “agile transformation” to read this).

Excerpts of the article:

The general understanding and perception of “Agile” or “agile”

” ‘Agile’ as we have come to know it whether we mean Scrum, Kanban, Lean, Lean Start-up, or any of the many other Agile frameworks is, in most cases a collection of historic good practices and guidelines identified by successful leaders and businesses in the past, they have been collected under one umbrella polished up a bit and marketed – very successfully – which is likely why you are reading this. I say this to discourage the notion that ‘Agile’ is new and untested, there are certainly some misinterpretations and misapplications but the underlying principles are sound and based on a lot of experience.”

In fact, each company or organisations should be concerned to become more agile (as defined in the dictionary), this is a matter of sound principles and ‘common sense‘ (for example: eliminate waste and become more effective in what you do – certainly in software development / product delivery there are many ways to achieve this).

If an agile transformation is not an end-goal, what is the goal?

Organisations shouldn’t embark on a mission to become agile, without understanding what it takes in terms of cultural and organisational changes – and most importantly: figure out what they want to achieve – why do you need a change?

Questions to be asked:

Are your customers dissatisfied?

Are your products missing the mark?

Do you (or your clients) feel you are not getting value for money?

Are you slow to market?

If you are creating software products for internal teams are they not having the impact you expected?

Are people circumventing your tools?

Is your ROI on software development too low?

Are you losing key development staff?

Is there a lack of transparency in the software development process?

As you notice these questions which concern the whole organisation. Any initiative for improvement should be looked at globally – at an organisational (systems) level – in order to avoid local optimisations.

What are the major areas of improvement?

Transform from projects to products, including:

Stop managing, and start leading

Shift from “output” (deliverables), to focus on “outcomes”

Embrace the idea there is (and will be) uncertainty, instead of fighting it.

“Agile Product Leadership is about accepting the plan is likely wrong or at the very least unclear and the scope is unknown, and so adapting to change and building the right things to fulfil our customers’ needs.”

Reward people based on contribution to a common goal, instead of individual performance

Changing from:“What will I do today?” to “What can I do to help the team towards our goal today?”
can make a huge difference to behaviour.

Common understanding why we want to change as an organisation

“Your business should be saying:

Where do we need to improve?

and how will we measure success?

Agile transformation may be a means of reaching that goal.

“If you choose an Agile Transformation you will measure success by delivering what customers need, by creating happy and satisfied customers not adherence to a plan. You will measure teams success by those that are willing to learn and grow. By empowering teams to make decisions for themselves you can create an environment of continuous improvement.”

Listening to podcasts

Podcasts are a great way to learn and to listen in to conversations with people you’ve might have heard of, but you don’t really know who they are. Podcasts are a tremendous source to learn about new topics – virtually anything!

I’ve been listening to podcasts for a while, mainly topics relevant to my professional occupation – but there are many many podcasts out there! I listen to podcast when commuting to work, on public transport or you can connect your mobile phone using bluetooth to your car audio system. At home in the evening, I can enjoy listening to a podcast (or an audiobook) – it’s a different experience than reading a book or blog – and I find it more relaxing.

Recommended podcasts on the topic of agile & lean thinking

Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Host: Vasco Duarte

Format: short episodes (10-15 minutes), from time to time a special longer episode

Content: Interviewing Scrum Masters world-wide

Why I like it: Vasco is a a great interviewer, the podcast has a clear structure, and Vasco is knowledge able on the topic – in other words, he can place questions and answers, he can put items discussed in a larger context. You hear real-world experiences of Scrum Masters. One remark: I do sometimes skip certain episodes if the interviewee doesn’t speak English good enough 🙂

The podcast has a fixed format: each week a Scrum Master is interviewed. Each day of the week, the Scrum Master interviewed is asked a question.

And some Belgian have been interviewed too! (Gunther Verheyen, Yves Hanoulle)

Agile for Humans

Why I like it: these podcasts are recordings of informal chats and panel discussions, with people like Tim Ottinger, Zach Bonaker, Amitai Schleier. By listening you can follow their thoughts process, hear pro’s and con’s and challenge their thinking with your own thinking.

The Agile Uprising had a project in which they interviewed most of the agile manifesto signatories. You can hear them speak about how the agile manifesto for software development came about, how the term ‘agile‘ was chosen, and how actually that meeting at Snowbird, Utah, in 2001 went.